Online claim of double voting in Maryland lacks evidence

"Election fraud: Democrats are voting twice in Maryland" is the headline for a Nov. 5 posting on Alex Jones' InfoWars website being shared on Facebook. It was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)

Readers who look below the headline will see no story and no documentation, just a nearly-10-minute video of Jones' show in which an anonymous caller, identified as "Kevin in West Virginia" who says:

"I actually moved to Maryland and I had to vote in Maryland for the early election or for early voting, and one thing that I witnessed -- people had already voted and they're letting them vote again. And this was in Hagerstown, Maryland. And I don't quite understand how they can do that."

Jones asks: "What were you seeing?"

Kevin responds: "Well, I'm blind so I didn't see it. I could hear them saying, ‘Um, you know, Oh! You voted yesterday but you can go ahead and recast your vote again today.' I mean, it's insane, and I wish I could have pulled my phone out or recorder at the time and gotten this on audio or something."

Jones then asserts, without offering evidence, that Democrats in Maryland, Texas and "all over" have been busted for doing the same type of thing, adding, "And it's always Democrats because they have no morals."

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Jones does not ask, and the caller does not say, if there was any indication that the person trying to vote again was a Democrat.

"Somebody's making a joke, I'm guessing," Donna Duncan, assistant deputy for election policy at the Maryland State Board of Elections, told PolitiFact in a phone interview.

She said that early voting is done through the electronic voter registration database and anyone who tried to vote twice would be immediately flagged. Their only other option, if they insisted that they hadn't voted yet, would be to cast a provisional ballot, which would be investigated by election officials and never counted if it was confirmed that the person had already voted.

Duncan said she was unaware of any specific complaints of double voting in the Nov 6 election.

In short, InfoWars is alleging voting fraud by Democrats in Maryland based on the claim of a single anonymous caller who says he overheard a comment that was casually made in public under circumstances that, even if accurately interpreted, don't implicate any particular political party.

Because the claim is absent of real evidence, we rate it Pants on Fire!